Companies to spend more on cybersecurity in 2015

In the wake of several high profile hacks in 2014, companies are set to spend more on cybersecurity this year, according to a survey by Piper Jaffray.

In the wake of several high profile hacks in 2014, companies are set to spend more on cybersecurity this year, according to a survey by Piper Jaffray.

In total, 75 percent of respondents to the survey of 112 CIOs said they would be spending more on cybersecurity in 2015 than they had in 2014. Business Insider recalls that last year’s survey also recorded a significant number of respondents looking to up their security spend, but this was still only 59 percent, so this year’s figures show a significant jump.

“CIOs clearly have heightened concerns from the many security breaches that occurred in 2014, resulting in an inflection in overall security spending,” explained the report.

The next biggest areas of spending were listed as ‘mobile devices’ (62 percent), ‘off-premise enterprise software’ (59 percent) and ‘storage’ (51 percent). The last categories are interesting, because the report also indicated a hesitancy for companies to move to cloud storage, with 35 percent of respondents citing ‘security’ as the main reason they would prefer to keep things on their own data centers.

Elsewhere in the report, 88 percent of CIOs stated that network security was their top priority for the year ahead, and 78 percent pitched endpoint security as their main focus. 37 percent stated that they planned to use a third party security provider.

The Wall Street Journal highlights recent high-profile cybersecurity breaches at major banks and retailers as reason that many companies will “take a closer look at how they protect and defend their systems.” In a blog post on the site, Steven Norton writes that “Cyberattacks are quickly becoming a ‘not if, but when’ situation, and gaining the attention of corporate boards.”

These findings seems to echo a report from Gartner in August 2014, which estimated that global security spending would increase by 8.2 percent in 2015 to reach a total spend of $76.9 billion.